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Image Optimization & Duplicate Content Issues

I have a new site that we're building which will incorporate some product thumbnail images cut and pasted from other sites and I would like some advice on how to properly manage those images on our site. Here's one sample scenario from the new website:

We're building furniture and the client has the option of selecting 50 plastic laminate finish options from the Formica company. We'll cut and paste those 50 thumbnails of the various plastic laminate finishes and incorporate them into our site. Rather than sending our website visitors over to the Formica site, we want them to stay put on our site, and select the finishes from our pages.

The borrowed thumbnail images will not represent the majority of the site's content and we have plenty of our own images and original content. As it does not make sense for us to order 50 samples from Formica & photograph them ourselves, what is the best way to handle to issue?

6 Responses

Thanks for your reply. We do have an account with them and permission to use their images.

Do you have any opinions as to the best way to manage the images - ie title, alt text, etc - so as not to run into any duplicate content issues? I'm not clear if Google has the ability to somehow scan the images themselves, or if they just rely on the alt text, titles, etc that you provide along with the images. Any thoughts are appreciated.

If you have permission to use their images, just get images from them, name them accurately, and give them accurate alt-text. Duplicate content has to do with your own content, in general. Since the point of naming images and alt-text is to help Google understand them, it's not a big issue if an image has the same alt-text as another or appears multiple times on the site (especially since they should all be coming from an images directory, no matter where they are on the website). Also, images are much more likely to be naturally reused than text, as licensing photos is a long accepted practice.

I do not think using some images from another website will hurt your SEO. Logo's on a 'our clients' page, news photography delivered through news agencies, icon sets and stock images are by definition used on more than one site. The fact that this form of 'duplicate content' is so omni present, proofs that Google cannot devaluate sites using it.

If you your goal is to rank high in image search for formica in different colours, you should make sure to get your own high res images. If this is not one of your primary SEO goals, you should not worry about using copied images.

My advice would be to focus on really good photography of the furniture you are building and do not worry to much about the thumbnails of formica samples.

PS: I agree with KeriMorget. You should get permission to use the photo's before using them on your site.

You are correct that we're not looking to rank for images of Formica samples (or any of our other samples for that matter), in fact we're just providing the sample images to help our clients better decide which one of our products to order. The sample tiles are just a means to an end.

Do you have any knowledge as to the extent to which Google can "see" an image the same way a human user sees an image? Does Google just rely on the alt text that that you provide them with?

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